The release also addresses issues related to anti-debugger and anti-tampering behaviors, which notably improves compatibility for titles like Peggle Deluxe and Crysis 2: Maximum Edition. The optimizations yield impressive performance gains, with examples showing nearly a 39% increase in frames per second (FPS) for Cyberpunk 2077, while other titles demonstrate varying levels of improvement.
FEX-2508 also includes a commitment to enhance the performance of Arm64 Wine by removing paired usage in multiple components, leading to overall streamlined code execution. Specific adjustments have been made to several subsystems, including memory allocation, opcode handling, and JIT compilation processes to minimize overhead and improve efficiency.
Additionally, the release announces support for Ubuntu 25.04 and introduces the upload of WINE DLL artifacts for users interested in experimentation with the main branch of the software.
Overall, FEX-2508 represents a comprehensive step forward in the capabilities of FEX-Emu, enhancing both performance and compatibility, and addressing security considerations critical for gaming on ARM64 platforms.
In future updates, developers may focus on further refining the emulator's capabilities, optimizing support for more complex games, and potentially expanding compatibility with additional operating systems and hardware configurations. There could also be continued work on security features to safeguard user experiences, particularly as more games implement advanced anti-tamper technologies
FEX-2508 released
A new version of the FEX-Emu, an emulator that allows you to run x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices, has been released. The new release, FEX-2508, highlights significant performance improvements in JIT optimizations, call-return stack optimizations, and hardware TSO feature implementation. The release also includes improvements in the WINE wow64/arm64ec libraries, enabling Apple Silicon's hardware TSO feature, and implementing NX bit, a security feature that prevents games from executing unmapped executable code. Additionally, FEX has made improvements in anti-debugger/tamper behavior, including support for Peggle Deluxe and Crysis 2: Maximum Edition.
The FEX release FEX-2508 includes several changes to improve the performance of Arm64 Wine. These changes involve getting rid of pair usage in various components like allocator, ARM64EC, ASIMDOps, SVEOps, ArchHelpers, Arm64, Arm64Emitter, CMake, CUID, ELFContainer, EmulatedFiles, Frontend, OpcodeDispatcher, FileManagement, IR, InstcountCI, JIT, LibraryForwarding, wayland, DecodeNZCVCondition, PoolBufferWithTimedRetirement, Profiler, and XXFileHash. Additionally, the release includes fixes for the thunk unittest path, the update vcvtsd2si test, instcountci, and x87StackOptimizationPass. The release also includes support for Ubuntu 25.04 and updates to the XXFileHash and XXFileHash.
